He was thinking about a drink of water when he heard the cans rattle down in the arroyo. Someone, man or animal, was fooling with the fence.
Joe Bob lifted his rifle and began scanning with the scope, looking for people.
What he didn’t know was that two Mexican gunmen on the other side of the fence were also looking for him with nightscopes, better ones than Joe Bob could afford. They had been hired to escort eight mules to the paved highway on the northern side of Joe Bob’s ranch, where a vehicle would meet them to take the packages of cocaine on to Los Angeles.
The lead mule rattled the fence while the gunmen searched. One of the shooters, Jesus Morales, spotted Joe Bob Hays seated under a bush and settled the crosshairs of his scope on him. He squeezed the trigger.
The bullet smacked Joe Bob in the chest, a mortal wound, and he went over backward.
Nothing else moved on the ranch side of the fence, so after a twenty-minute wait to be sure, the fence was cut and the mules moved through the opening up the ancient trail. Morales climbed the bank of the arroyo to where Joe Bob Hays lay bleeding out. He found him with the nightscope.
To Morales’ amazement, the rancher was still alive. Morales pointed his rifle at the dying man’s head and pulled the trigger. His head exploded.
The Mexicans moved on, walking north with their loads. The wheels of commerce were turning, as they had to turn, for that was the way of the world.
At eleven o’clock that Saturday morning four clean-shaven, skinny young men bought tickets for the Amtrak Express to New York at the BWI Airport station between Washington and Baltimore. They had arrived in a stolen car that they parked on the upper level of the garage adjacent to the station. Carrying backpacks, they took the stairs down and into the train station and stood in line to buy tickets. When their turns came, they each paid cash for a ticket to New York, then went out onto the platform to wait for the train. There were no metal detectors to pass through; no one inspected their backpacks.
Ten minutes later the train arrived right on time. They climbed aboard, each entering a different car.
They found seats. The train was crowded, as usual. The young men looked around and were pleased to see that there were no uniformed police, no armed guards of any type, not that they expected any. This was America, the most under-policed nation on earth.
The train pulled out right on time, at twenty-two minutes after the hour. There was no clanking and jerking. Powered by electric locomotives, the train merely glided into motion.
The traveler who had boarded the last car, Salah al Semn, found that the only empty seat was in the middle of the car, facing two fit young men, one white, one black, clean-shaven, with military haircuts, wearing jeans and pull-over short-sleeve shirts. He had seen that type before in Iraq, and suspected, rightly, that they were in the American military. He ignored them. Beside him was a young person with unkempt long hair wearing ear buds and apparently listening to an iPod.
With their backpacks on their laps or in the overhead bins, all four of the men who boarded at BWI sat back in their seats, avoided eye contact with their fellow passengers, and checked their watches. They had some time to wait, so they watched the countryside pass outside the windows and thought private thoughts as the train ran along through suburbs and into downtown Baltimore.
In the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, a van pulled up outside a parochial school. There were three men in it, brown, clean-shaven skinny men in jeans. They sat watching as families parked their cars and took children into the school. Today was registration day for a new school year that was to begin Monday. Nuns ran the school and taught some of the classes. In the office, nuns supervised the registration process and shook hands with the parents and greeted the students, most of whom were returning for another year. The school was for children in grades one through six. It had been in operation for over a hundred years, and many of the parents were graduates.
The name of the school, Our Sisters of Mercy, was emblazoned above the main entrance, but the men in the van couldn’t read the words. Not only did they not know how to read and write English, they were illiterate in all the world’s languages, including their own, which was Farsi. The only education any of the three had ever received was in an Islamic school, where the sole item in the curriculum was the memorization of the Koran. The Prophet’s message, their teachers knew, was all the boys really needed to know to wend their way through this vale of tears and earn their way into Paradise.
The men in the van checked their watches. As the two in the front seat scrutinized every vehicle and watched traffic on the street, the man in back began opening bags and extracting semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifles, into which he inserted magazines.
At Yankee Stadium in the Bronx the players were on the field warming up, tossing balls around, taking batting practice, and signing autographs for the kids and fans who hung over the rails. The Yanks were not having a good year; they were third in the American League East standings, ten games off the pace, so management expected that only half the seats in the stadium would have bodies in them when the game against the Detroit Tigers started at precisely one o’clock.
The jihadist, Nuri Said, sat in the top tier of seats watching the activities on the field as fans wandered in. He had attended two games in the past few weeks and had a rudimentary understanding of the game, which he thought boring. Mainly he watched the uniformed police who stood here and there at the portals that people had to pass through to get to and from the stands to the vast galleries where there were restaurants, fast food stands, and restrooms.
Nuri had chosen Yankee Stadium for his jihad strike because of the television cameras that would make him and his three mates famous and immortal. The police were a necessary evil, he thought, and would kill all four of them, but not until after the cameras had captured the naked power of Islam for all the world’s infidels to see and ponder. Nuri Said and his three fellow believers would please Allah, he knew, which was more than most men accomplished in this life. That would be enough.
Salah al Semn found the waiting hard. He fidgeted. He tried to avoid eye contact with his fellow passengers on the train to New York, but found that he was watching them, sizing them up, wondering who they were as they got on and off at the depots in Baltimore and Wilmington. He repeatedly checked his watch. He was acutely aware that the two young men opposite him were watching him. Every time he glanced their way their eyes were upon him, and they didn’t look away.
He would kill them first, he thought. Infidel dogs.
The train was sliding into the station in Philadelphia when Salah al Semn checked his watch for the last time, picked up the backpack, which he had placed on the floor under his legs, and made his way toward the restroom.
Marine Sergeant Mike Ivy and Lance Corporal Scott Weidmann were from Brooklyn. They were on their way home for a week’s leave before they shipped out for tours in South Korea.
“He’s got a gun in that bag,” Weidmann whispered to Ivy.
“Something hard, with angles,” Ivy agreed. “Ain’t his underwear.”
As al Semn opened the door to the restroom and went inside, Ivy and Weidmann got up and went to the restroom door. Ivy put his ear to the door. The train coasted to a stop in the Philadelphia station.
The two Marines had to make way for people getting on and off the train, but in a moment the rush was over. Ivy leaned nonchalantly against the restroom door and listened while Weidmann watched the passengers in the car to see if anyone was paying attention. They weren’t, he decided. Everyone was getting settled for the ride on to Newark, then Pennsylvania Station in New York.